The Unconscious Matters: Sexuality, Violence, Regimes: A Short Conversation with Lara Sheehi

Honorary Research Fellow in Education within the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at the University of Manchester. During the preparation of this special issue, she was a lecturer in Global Health at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI). Her Ph.D. research critically explored the politics, or the role, of psychosocial support in the refugee camps of Greece. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, critical social theory, critical psychology, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism.

(she/her), is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program, where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the president of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and is on the advisory board for the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network.